“The Alien movies model how patriarchal culture distracts people from capitalism’s parasitism by designating women as the real threat.”
Tag: Motherhood
Ogden & Hardwick’s Everyday Enigmas
“Good afternoon, ma’am. Do you ever feel that it is so hard to know how to be happy?”
Can Motherhood Bend Toward Justice?
Can the work of mothering and everyday acts of care merge with efforts to achieve social justice?
Passion. Mess. Genius. Mother.
Pamela Adlon reveals the mundane project of motherhood to be vast, fluid, and fascinating in its own right.
My Mother’s Book, My Grandmother’s Life
“I always thought that the challenge of writing my grandmother’s story was capturing her singular voice. Rereading her emails, I remember why.”
“Just Use the Telephone, Please”: Hannah Zeavin on the Power of Teletherapy
“You can have really intense intimacy over distance, sometimes only because distance is there.”
Trans Women and Children on TV
The family as we know it today functions to further isolate trans children from trans women and vice versa. Thank goodness for TV.
Watching “Go Fish” with My Queer 15-Year-Old
“You can wear something to be cool,” you told me, “or because another person likes it. You don’t have to be truly ‘yourself,’ or whatever.”
“Mississippi Masala” @30: Revisiting a Film Classic in Authoritarian Times
What might it mean to forge a politics explicitly based in the places we are, rather than a politics of the places from which we came?
Brilliant Together: On Feminist Memoirs
Collective feminist narratives can acknowledge, to differing degrees, the stories that are missing from them.
Seek, Memory …
If memory is an unreliable narrator, how can it be the medium through which we arrive at the truth about ourselves?
B-Sides: Helen DeWitt’s “The Last Samurai”
Impossible to summarize, The Last Samurai is deeply political—anti-capitalist and thoroughly feminist—without ever becoming preachy or moralizing.
Mother of a Pandemic
If there is a way forward for the “pandemic novel,” it may be in Emma Donoghue’s claustrophobic settings of motherhood and childbirth.
Mother Courage
The summer I turned 17, in the springboard pause between high school and university, I began working as a nurse aide in the geriatric rest home and hospital run by my mother.
Motherhood and Other Monsters
In The Babadook and The Need, the introduction of a monster amplifies preexisting anxieties, rather than generating fresh ones.
Translation and Other Children: Liberaki’s “Three Summers”
While metaphors linking translation to human reproduction abound, Karen ...
Acts of Mothering
Back in 1976, Adrienne Rich described what she called the “institution of motherhood.” When biological motherhood was turned into a social and historical institution, she explained, the potential ...
Surrogacy Stories
Midway through Mike Birbiglia’s latest one-man show, The New One, the ceiling above the stage opens and various baby paraphernalia cascade onto the stage floor. An oversized stuffed bear, a breast ...
Our Mothers, Ourselves
I intended to begin with a personal admission. “I didn’t like being pregnant,” I was going to write, before describing the bodily discomforts (hypersalivation!) and psychic stresses (due date during ...
“Test-Tube Babies” @40
Forty years ago, on July 25, 1978, an English baby of ordinary working-class parentage was delivered by caesarian section. At 11:47 p.m., her mother, obstetrician Patrick Steptoe, Cambridge ...